When "Life is Sweet" arrived in American theaters, its effect was revelatory in a way Mike Leigh's previous work had not been. His films for TV and the cinema had gained him a loyal following but operated on a fainter register than this work, making their points with slightly less force. "Life is Sweet" gave viewers insight into where Leigh had been, artistically, with the telling dialogue (largely shaped, as is widely acknowledged by now, from improvisation) and mordant eruptions of argument. It also hinted at where he was going: into territory with far more visual and verbal polish, and gentler exposure of open psychological or sociopolitical wounds.
The film's arrival on a Criterion Collection DVD this week is cause for celebration. To say it's not plot-driven would be an understatement. Andy (Jim Broadbent) is one of the head chefs for a caterer. His wife Wendy (Alison Steadman) divides her time between teaching dance classes, waitressing and what she views as her homemaking duties. One of the family's daughters, Nicola (Jane Horrocks), who is very troubled, has a boyfriend and then loses him. Family friend Aubrey (Timothy Spall) tries to open a restaurant, which fails. Another friend, Patsy (Stephen Rea) persuades Andy to buy a sandwich van, which goes nowhere. Life continues. All of these events are both important and utterly unimportant in this story of a family's seesawing between function and dysfunction.
The film is ultimately a commedia dell'arte built around human imperfection, in which each character's flaws are exaggerated so much that he or she might be as well be wearing the makeup of the stage clowns of old. Leigh looks at everyone's problems so closely that, by the film's end, character development is almost beside the point. We are left looking at "Life is Sweet" mainly to find our own traits, and the thin mini-plots — about a failed restaurant or a broken ankle, for instance — are all but tossed aside.
This is also true, to a certain extent, of Leigh's 1993 drama "Naked," a character portrait of a wildly verbose failed lothario or possible rapist; the dark streets of this urban travelogue are a long way from the bleak, well-lit spaces of "Life is Sweet"", as is the later film's love of language for language's sake, expressed through David Thewlis's logorrheic monologues. (Thewlis's memorable role as Nicola's boyfriend in "Life is Sweet" eschews these dramatic monologues, save one moment when he confronts her witheringly about her intellectual pretensions.)
Very little of the conversation in "Life is Sweet" is substantive; it concerns itself with daily things — so much so, indeed, that when two characters do actually speak of anything more grave, such as the physical crisis which defines Nicola's life, the moment registers with all the greater intensity. And yet, though the talk might often be light, talk is everything here; in some scenes the characters simply sit staring and motionless, life revelations traded as offhand remarks.
The director's commentary on "Life is Sweet" offers far less insight, though it does show Leigh's love for his actors. The most surprising statement he makes is at the film's conclusion, when he calls the film, oddly enough, his "least favorite," without much explanation. The DVD also contains a wonderful hour-long interview with Leigh, in which he talks memorably about the difficulty he had resolving the film's plot, as well as describing his improvisatory process (after apologizing for repeating it) — among many such nuggets.
And yet none of this is crucial information, and it does not communicate nearly as much about Leigh as his work does: that its director understands that moments of contentment might occur in the midst of an awful life, and though we might not notice them when they come along, he can dramatize them for us so we'll notice them next time.
Max Winter is a poet and critic, and the managing editor of the IndieWire blog Press Play. He has published reviews in The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out New York, Bookforum, and other publications. His first book of poems, The Pictures, was published by Tarpaulin Sky Press. He co-edits the press Solid Objects, and he is a Poetry Editor of Fence.